legal January 2009

legal@lists.fedoraproject.org

20 participants
17 discussions

Truly public namespaces on Fedora wiki
by Paul W. Frields 16 Jan '09

16 Jan '09

This question came up at a FUDCon discussion about the wiki. The wiki globally asserts that pages are licensed under the OPL, and we license in that fashion pursuant to contributors having signed the CLA. However, in the FUDCon: namespace, we allow the public to edit pages, because that's the nature of FUDCon. We do not require people to become Fedora account holders or CLA signers to attend FUDCon, but those people must be free to pre-register, thus these pages must be editable by non-authenticated persons. These edits by non-authenticated persons will be labeled with an IP address. Notably, it's possible that a Fedora account holder (who could authenticate) might accidentally edit these pages in a non-authenticated way. The effect would be that the edit would look like any other non-authenticated edit even though presumably the Fedora account holder fully intended it to be an authenticated edit and thus covered by the CLA, and so forth. The wiki does not provide the means for a non-authenticated person to confirm OPL licensing. It does warn anyone who saves an edit that their work may be edited and that material must not be copied onto the wiki without proper permission, and links to the Legal:Licenses page where the OPL licensing statement lives. But there is no statement to the effect that "By clicking the Save Page button, you agree that your submission will be licensed under the terms found at _____". Since we switched to MediaWiki it's possible that we've simply failed to provide an equivalent language transfer in this case. So my questions are as follows: 1. Can a non-authenticated person agree to the OPL license when making a submission, such that the agreement is meaningful and enforceable (or at least free of risk for the Fedora Project) without personally identifying information? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," should we attach a statement of affirmative licensing prominently near the "Save Page" button? 3. If the answer to #1 is "no," should we alter FUDCon:, and any other namespace on the wiki designed to be publicly editable, to provide their contents under public domain or no license, and notate that on the Legal:Licenses page? My hope is that the answers to #1 and #2 are "yes," but I wanted those answers to emerge here on fedora-legal-list if possible. -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

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mldonkey's src/utils/lib/md4.h licence
by Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski 15 Jan '09

15 Jan '09

Hello. As noted in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=452584#c13 , mldonkey appears to include a header file with a licence I wasn't able to identify. My concern is that (if I'm reading it correctly) it doesn't grant explicit permission to distribute derivative works, only "make and use" them. Am I mistaken? Is this licence acceptable for Fedora? Quote: /* Copyright (C) 1990-2, RSA Data Security, Inc. All rights reserved. License to copy and use this software is granted provided that it is identified as the "RSA Data Security, Inc. MD4 Message-Digest Algorithm" in all material mentioning or referencing this software or this function. License is also granted to make and use derivative works provided that such works are identified as "derived from the RSA Data Security, Inc. MD4 Message-Digest Algorithm" in all material mentioning or referencing the derived work. RSA Data Security, Inc. makes no representations concerning either the merchantability of this software or the suitability of this software for any particular purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty of any kind. These notices must be retained in any copies of any part of this documentation and/or software. */ Regards, R. -- Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Rathann RPMFusion http://rpmfusion.org | MPlayer http://mplayerhq.hu "Faith manages." -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"

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shipping icons possibly trademarked
by Mamoru Tasaka 15 Jan '09

15 Jan '09

Hello. Currently on rawhide "cairo-dock" (this is package name) tarball which is created by checking out upstream SVN repository contains some icons which may be trademarked by some game software companies. They are under: plug-ins/Cairo-Penguin/data/themes/*/ I would appreciate it if you would check if these icons can be included in Fedora srpm and installed with binary rpms. If not I can simply remove these icons from cairo-dock tarball. Regards, Mamoru

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Re: [Fedora-legal-list] policy on shipping/using flags
by Peter Gordon 14 Jan '09

14 Jan '09

[Please forgive the lack of a proper Reply-To header for threading on this one. I subscribed to this list only after reading the beginnings of this thread on the archives, and have copied the content into this message from those postings.] On Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:29:08 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote: > For a torrent tracker that is in fact tied to a country of origin for > the torrent source, the flag makes sense. The way Deluge upstream uses the flags is to mark the country of origin for the details in the "Peers" information tab, so that's not really applicable here. > The upstream has to be willing to keep that updated, though; when a > country changes flags, for example. However, is there a source for > free-as-in-freedom images for all flags? Is Deluge making their own? Well, the flags that Deluge uses are PD images from FamFamFam.com [1], and the Deluge developers do intend (as is my understanding) to keep them updated. However, the original source is rather old (from 2005 according to File Roller) so I do not know if _that_ upstream is inactive simply from lack of necessity or due to other priorities. [1] http://famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/ And, Roozbeh: Thanks very much for bringing up this discussion in such a thought-provoking way. I hope we can get this issue resolved - one way or the other - in a timely manner. :) Peter Gordon (codergeek42) <peter(a)thecodergeek.com> 「ゴードン・ピーター」

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hotbabe and Fedora
by Rahul Sundaram 08 Jan '09

08 Jan '09

Hi http://dindinx.net/hotbabe/ Someone asked me if they can submit this to Fedora, FYI refer http://lwn.net/Articles/113644/ Rahul

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Re: [Fedora-legal-list] Heads-up on new Samba4 licence
by Tom Callaway 04 Jan '09

04 Jan '09

On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 09:53 +1100, Andrew Bartlett wrote: > On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 10:40 -0500, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote: > > On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 10:18 +1100, Andrew Bartlett wrote: > > > Samba4 (which is under review for inclusion into Fedora) will soon ship > > > some data (the Active Directory schema) under less-than-usual licence > > > terms. > > > > > > The attached file gives the text. > > > > > > I believe it is no less free than Free licences on Fonts that require > > > redistribution with software. > > > > > > The review ticket is: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=453083 > > > > > > If this causes a problem, presumably the packager can strip > > > setup/ad-schema (and the whole server implementation) from the tarball. > > > > Andrew, do you know if these specific schemas fall under the OSP? > > I can't see it on the list, and I would be very supprised if it was. It > does however fall under the 'no patents' WSPP licence agreement that the > PFIF signed with Microsoft, as Microsoft provided it to me under that > agreement. > > http://www.protocolfreedom.org/PFIF_agreement.pdf > > (It isn't much different to the rest of Samba in that regard) Okay. I'll look over this and hopefully have this cleared before the end of this week. Thanks, ~spot

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Dock-like application status
by Mathieu Bridon 01 Jan '09

01 Jan '09

Hi, First of all, I wish you all a happy new year. I saw in the Brazilian Fedora magazine [1] that Apple had patented its Dock application. The magazine says that the patent covers « positioning of icons and cursors, as well as the zoom effect when the mouse moves over an icon ». The actual text of the patent [2] is: """ Methods and systems for providing graphical user interfaces are described. To provide greater access and consolidation to frequently used items in the graphical user interface, a userbar is established which includes a plurality of item representations. To permit a greater number of items to reside in the userbar, a magnification function can be provided which magnifies items within the userbar when they are proximate the cursor associated with the graphical user interface. """ Is the legal team aware of this issue ? What's gonna happen about those dock-like applications in the Fedora repositories, given the Fedora policy on patented software ? Regards, [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-December/msg0024… [2] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=… ---------- Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) French Fedora Ambassador ---------- "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin

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legal January 2009